Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Backing up an external hard drive?

LadyX

LadyX

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Mar 4, 2012
2,374
252
Is there such a thing as backing up an external hard drive, other than the obvious one of buying another one and copying all my files to it? I'm asking because I had an external hard drive (I forgot which brand it was as it was a couple of years ago), I had everything on it, assignments, presentations, movies, iTunes songs, pictures. Then it started making sounds and all of a sudden it stopped working. I almost cried! Anyway, I got a 1TB Western Digital a year (or two?) ago and so far it's been working great but I've dropped it twice. I don't know but I have a feeling that the same thing will happen as the old one.
 
Since backing up is creating another copy, you either need another external HDD to clone to (the cheapest option) or use one of the cloud services (quite expensive and slow).
 
Yes.

If it is purely for extra external storage and not exclusively a regular interval back-up, you can use a program like Superduper and connect as many HD's as you like and choose your back-up options between them.

I have 2 x HD's the same size as my Mac HD (2gb) and clone one with Superduper and use Time machine with the other.

The advantage with Superduper is that, if your computer fails you can carry on working on another compatible mac, booting-up with the clone drive.

This result in not losing much productivity.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
 
LadyX said:
But Time Machine stores the backup on the Mac, right? If so, I don't have enough space on my MacBook Air.
Click to expand...

It would back it up to yet another external hard drive if you had one.

You might want to consider a service like BackBlaze or CrashPlan to back it up to a cloud service. You can make all the backups you want to multiple HDs, but if all your backups are in the same physical location, all the backups in the world won't help you if your house gets robbed, flooded, burns down or whatever.
 
You might want to check out the Space Monkey project in KickStarter.com. It combines an external drive with automatic cloud backup but without the slowness of typical cloud backup services because your data is encrypted, chopped in pieces, and redundantly backed up on other Space Monkey users devices. I have no connection to the project except as a backer. The project will be funded in 6 days, do better hurry up if interested.
 
yg17 said:
It would back it up to yet another external hard drive if you had one.

You might want to consider a service like BackBlaze or CrashPlan to back it up to a cloud service. You can make all the backups you want to multiple HDs, but if all your backups are in the same physical location, all the backups in the world won't help you if your house gets robbed, flooded, burns down or whatever.
Click to expand...

To save heart breaks when a HD dies/or disaster strikes , my whole family hold each others back-ups. This works as we see each other on a weekly routine. I hold three separate HD's each of 1TB. One HD is for my own computer, and the other two are for my family. Every time we meet we swap HD's. With the cost of HD's now so low it's cheap and cheerful.:)
 
I have around 50GB of specific files backed up to Amazon AWS and it only costs me around $5.50 per month. AWS is a very affordable cloud backup solution.

If you aren't familiar, Amazon charges barely anything to store data on their servers. You will pay more when you download to your local machine, but that would only be when your drive fails and you need a backup.

It's still significantly cheaper than other cloud services.
 
applesith said:
I have around 50GB of specific files backed up to Amazon AWS and it only costs me around $5.50 per month. AWS is a very affordable cloud backup solution.

If you aren't familiar, Amazon charges barely anything to store data on their servers. You will pay more when you download to your local machine, but that would only be when your drive fails and you need a backup.

It's still significantly cheaper than other cloud services.
Click to expand...

BackBlaze is $5 month for unlimited storage and there's no cost to upload or download. I fail to see how Amazon is significantly cheaper.
 
yg17 said:
BackBlaze is $5 month for unlimited storage and there's no cost to upload or download. I fail to see how Amazon is significantly cheaper.
Click to expand...

Never used them. Not sure how reliable a company offering $5 unlimited backup is considering the costs of maintaining such a service. I wouldn't want to backup my business's files to that with sensitive information.

I've used cheap online hosting sites for website hosting and connections were always so slow because of how many users' data they cram on each server.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back